Grow a garden on your loo roll: GARDENING BOOKS OF THE YEAR by Jane Shilling

There was a time, not so long ago, when gardening tended to be regarded as the preserve of people with a good deal of surplus land and time on their hands, or alternatively of cottagey types with gardens full of orderly rows of Brussels sprouts and properly earthed-up leeks.

Not any more, though. It’s not just that every courgette or tomato you grow is one you don’t have to buy in the supermarket (though when you consider the price of vegetables, that is a compelling argument in favour of gardening), but there is something quite magical about the act of planting a dry seed that within a few weeks has grown into a healthy, productive plant. And when you’ve done it successfully once, it’s almost impossible to stop.

WINDOW-BOX ALLOTMENT BY PENELOPE BENNETT (Frances Lincoln £16.99)

You don’t even need a garden to grow fruit, vegetables and herbs. Penelope Bennett was a writer before she took to window-box gardening, and her prettily-illustrated book is garnished with amusing literary snippets and striking turns of phrase - a young blackbird who takes to uprooting her seedlings is ‘like a delinquent adolescent gardener on work experience’. Her book, which is both fun to read and encouraging for the novice gardener, is organised by month - from sowing herbs and tomatoes in a propagator and harvesting container-grown potatoes in January to planning next year’s mini crops and growing oyster mushrooms on loo rolls in December.

Gardens feed the eye, as well as the appetite, and Isabelle Palmer’s enticing book is full of stylish and ingenious ideas for brightening up the smallest outside space. Her ‘cocktail’ window box, planted with strawberries, mint and a mini kumquat tree, or her mixed salad grown in a pretty old wooden wine crate would make fabulous presents for an urban sophisticate. And I love her pallet wall planter, which transforms a wooden pallet and a dozen heather plants into a ravishingly pretty miniature take on the spectacular ‘green walls’ that have become fashionable in city gardening where horizontal space is at a premium, but vertical space is plentiful.

SWEET PEAS FOR SUMMER: HOW TO CREATE A GARDEN IN A YEAR BY LAETITIA MAKLOUF (Bloomsbury £20)

For impatient people, the downside of gardening is the time it takes to get started. Laetitia Maklouf understands that most of us want an outside room that looks pretty and inviting, but doesn’t require us to be constantly out there, weeding and deadheading.

Her ideas for creating a garden in a year come from her own experience of dealing with an oddly-shaped London garden. She is honest about the tough stuff (digging)! But she understands the need for fun, and her horticultural advice, arranged by season, is punctuated with tips on how to make a summer wedding bouquet, or a miniature cactus landscape in a bowl (with the witty added touch of a tiny Western-style galloping plastic horse).

JAMES WONG'S HOMEGROWN REVOLUTION (Weidenfeld & Nicolson £20)

Television botanist James Wong is convinced that home gardeners are stuck in a time warp, still doggedly growing spuds, swedes and sprouts as though Digging for Victory.

It’s a long time since I’ve seen a swede in an urban garden, and if your plot is shady, you may find that some of James’s exotic edibles are too sun-loving for you (though he gives a list of shade-lovers, including Alpine strawberries, Vietnamese fish mint and the alarming-sounding blue sausage fruits). But if you have a sunny garden - or even a window box - you’ll be inspired by his alternatives to broccoli and kale, which include edible flowers, the pungent Japanese horseradish, Wasabi, and herbs such as the kaffir lime and cardamom.

FLOWERS EVERY DAY BY PAULA PRYKE WITH PHOTOGRAPHY BY RACHEL WHITING (Jacqui Small £25)

The most miserable winter’s day can be cheered by the sight of even a modest bunch of flowers. Paula Pryke is a very grand florist (or “floral artist” as her website has it) whose customers have included such celebrities as Cate Blanchett and Stephen Fry.

But her new book focuses on the kind of simple arrangements that any of us might assemble from our own gardens, eked out with a modest addition of shop-bought blooms. It’s as much about the containers as the flowers – one particularly lovely photograph shows a bunch of twiggy, but intensely fragrant, winter honeysuckle transformed by a beautiful celadon-green vase. But all Pryke’s ideas – such as filling a clear glass container with layers of brightly coloured crab apples as the base for an arrangement of autumn berries – are brilliantly inspiring.

Time was when Alan Titchmarsh was rather a down-to-earth sort of chap, and I’m sure he hasn’t left his basic gardening roots behind. But his new book is definitely the stuff of aspirational gardening dreams.

What he modestly refers to as his “plot” consists of four acres with a handsome Georgian house at the heart of it. There are wildflower meadows, topiary box balls, and a enough statuary to fill a museum, including an alarming terracotta representation of the 18th-century landscape gardener, Humphrey Repton. Alan describes his book as “a soapbox for me to expound a modest amount of my personal garden philosophy”, and his breezily written text (“I am beginning to sound like an old-age pensioner. Well, what the heck!”) is full of handy tips on (rather grand) garden design. But you may just prefer to gawp at the ravishing photographs of his immaculate “plot”.

GARDENING AT LONGMEADOW BY MONTY DON (BBC Books £25)

Monty Don shares his garden at Longmeadow, in Herefordshire, with two million people – the viewers of BBC 2’s Gardeners’ World, of which he is a co-presenter.

But Longmeadow is also the place where his family has grown up over the past 20 years – time over which it has evolved from an unpromising patch covered in brambles and builders’ rubble into an intricate design made up of 19 different sections, including an Ornamental Vegetable Garden, a Walled Garden and something enticingly known as the Jewel Garden, filled with jewel-coloured and metallic plants for maximum impact throughout the summer. We don’t all have Monty’s space, but it is fascinating to follow his progress throughout the gardening year, from January’s hellebores to December’s mistletoe.

A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF BETH CHATTO'S GARDENS BY FERGUS GARRETT WITH PHOTOGRAPHS BY RACHEL WARNE (Frances Lincoln £16.99)

There is a welcome absence of advice on double-digging or how to set up a wormery in this photographic record of the seasons in Beth Chatto’s famous five-acre garden in Essex. Chatto, the octogenarian doyenne of gardening writers, contributes a forward to this book, and Fergus Garrett, head gardener at the late Christopher Lloyd’s garden at Great Dixter, contributes an introduction and brief seasonal essays. But the splendid photographs of Chatto’s gardens, full of interest at every season of the year, are the real point of this book.